Adapted from a speech given to the Forsyth County Republican Women’s Federation, Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2007, at the Pinebrook Country Club in Winston Salem, N.C.

In 2004, the nationwide total for George W. Bush was 62 million votes -- the most votes won by any presidential candidate in American history, making him the first president in 16 years to win a majority of the popular vote. Still, that was not quite 51 percent -- barely enough to beat John Kerry, probably the most liberal presidential candidate to win the Democratic nomination since George McGovern in 1972. You hear people talk about Red States and Blue States, but 2004 was a lot closer than that, and yet somehow the Republicans in Washington got the idea they’d achieved a permanent majority.

Now, we could talk about the blunders that ensued from the arrogance in Washington. We could talk about the Social Security reform bill, we could talk about the Abramoff scandal, we could talk about Terri Schiavo, and we could talk all night about the president’s stupid amnesty plan. I’ll be happy to take questions about any of that later, but right now it’s important to concentrate on the sheer, stupid arrogance of the Republicans in Washington.

See, Washington is like a big echo chamber. People sit around talking to their friends, and reading their own press releases, and next thing you know, they start thinking they’re so smart, and so powerful, and so important that they don’t have to pay attention to those microscopic pygmies called the voters. . . .

To make a long story short, the Republicans in Washington ignored the voters, and when the election rolled around in 2006, the voters returned the favor. I told you that in 2004, George Bush got 62 million votes. Well, in 2004, House Republicans running for re-election got less than 36 million votes. So more than 26 million Republican voters stayed home.
Well, you say, it was an off-year election. But if you compare 2004 to 2006, you see that the Democratic vote declined by about 28 percent; the Republican vote declined by 42 percent.

That’s a huge drop-off, and this was despite a significant fund-raising advantage for Republicans. During the 2006 election cycle, comparing the totals of the major national campaign committees for both parties, Republicans raised over $700 million and the Democrats raised a little less than $600 million.

The Republicans had an advantage of more than $100 million dollars, and still lost the mid-term election by a margin of more than 7 million votes nationwide. By the way, I told you about the House Republican total in 2006 being 26 million votes less than what Bush got in 2004. The Senate vote was even worse. Republican Senate candidates got nearly 35 million fewer votes than Bush got in 2004. . . .

In a period of two years, the Republicans in Washington had alienated millions of American conservatives. And I’m here to tell you, it wasn’t the fault of the voters, it was the fault of the Republicans in Washington.

The Republicans in Washington forgot the simple, basic lessons of the one man most responsible for building the conservative movement in America, Ronald Reagan.

First of all, the Republicans in Washington keep forgetting the most important thing about Ronald Reagan: He used to be a Democrat. And not just a Democrat, but by his own description, Reagan was a bleeding-heart liberal Democrat. He was so liberal that, during the 1940s, he actually joined two Communist Party front organizations without realizing it.
By the time he wised up, Reagan found that the Communists were trying to put him out of work. The Communists had taken over some of the trade unions in Hollywood, and they had a big strike, and Reagan found himself on the other side. And next thing you know, Reagan discovered that when he started fighting Communists, some of his liberal friends weren’t his friends anymore. . . .

You see, when a liberal stops being a liberal, his ex-friends are going to call him every name in the book. And Reagan’s old liberal friends called him a fascist, they called him a Nazi, they called him a warmonger and a racist and pretty much everything else that liberals call conservatives to this day.

Well, Reagan wasn’t stupid. He knew who he was, and he knew he was the same old Ronald Reagan he’d always been. The only thing that had changed was his politics, and that’s just politics, right? Well, no, it’s not just politics, not to those so-called liberals.

To a liberal, politics is everything. Liberalism isn’t just politics, it’s an identity. It’s who you are, it’s what you want to be, it’s the be-all, end-all of existence. It’s a kind of secular religion, where you get to vote your way into heaven, and heaven is right here, right now, as long as liberals are running things.

Thomas Sowell calls this “the vision of the anointed.” By being a liberal, by believing in liberal causes, you become one of the wise, the enlightened, the caring, the concerned. And by being a liberal, you distinguish yourself as being morally superior to everybody else. Because you are one of the anointed few, you are endowed with the vision that enables you to perceive the true causes of human suffering. Why it’s those evil, greedy, mean-spirited Republicans, that’s who!

Now, as I said, Reagan used to be a liberal Democrat, and he knew what it felt like to bask in the warm approval of his fellow liberals. And then, slowly but surely, he began to realize that what the liberals believed in, well, it simply wasn’t true. The poor aren’t poor because some greedy rich man took their money. You can’t fix poverty by taking away the rich man’s money and giving it to the poor. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot more poor people than there are rich people, and so this sort of liberal Robin Hood scheme will never work. It’s mathematically impossible.

It doesn’t have anything to do with who cares more for the poor. It just doesn’t work, and in the process of trying to make it work, liberals screw up the free-market economy. And when you come right down to it, the free-market economy -- jobs, prosperity, economic growth -- is the only real hope the poor man has to get ahead. When liberals would start their class warfare talk and start badmouthing rich people, Ronald Reagan liked to say he knew one thing for sure: “No poor man ever gave me a job.”

This is just basic common sense. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out. And that’s the big difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe in liberalism because it makes them feel like they’re smarter than everybody else. See, liberalism is complicated, and liberals will always tell you that the issues are “complex,” so complex that you need some genius to figure everything out for you. You need government experts to plan everything for you and tell you how to live your life.

Ronald Reagan never believed that. Ronald Reagan believed in the good common sense of the American people, and he believed that the people could run their own lives better without some government official telling them what to do all the time.

It’s not complicated, it’s really very simple. It’s just common sense, but liberals have been telling the same old lies for so long that some people can’t recognize it. And just like a lot of ex-liberals, once Ronald Reagan wised up, he started wondering how it was he ever came to believe all that liberal nonsense. So he started studying, and I mean he really buckled down.
Folks, if you ever have a chance to go to California, you need to go to Santa Barbara and visit the Reagan Ranch. . . . The Young America’s Foundation bought Reagan’s ranch up in the hills above Santa Barbara a few years ago, and they’ve preserved it just the way that Ronald and Nancy Reagan left it, right down to the books on Reagan’s personal bookshelf. I’ve been there, and I’ve seen it myself. And I’m telling you, Reagan read all the important books. Mises and Hayek, and Whitaker Chambers and Richard Weaver -- all of it.

Reagan spent years studying what was wrong with liberalism, and he studied the conservative alternatives, and by the time he became president, he not only knew what he believed, he knew why he believed it. He understood liberalism better than any liberal, and he understood conservatism right down deep in his bones. And as for communism, well, as Reagan liked to say, “You know the difference between a communist and an anti-communist? A communist is somebody who has read Marx and Lenin. An anti-communist is somebody who understands Marx and Lenin.”

Reagan understood communism better than the communists understood it. He understood that communism never works, because it is economically impossible. In 1920, just three years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Ludwig von Mises demonstrated conclusively that a socialist economy can never work -- and the communists spent the next 70 years proving Mises right.

This basic insight is what led Reagan to take such a hard-line stance against the Soviet Union. For years and years, Americans were told that we could have peaceful coexistence with communism. But that’s impossible. Why? Because communism doesn’t work economically. Communism can’t generate economic growth. As a matter of fact, communism produces the very opposite of growth. So in order to keep itself going, every communist government ultimately does two things: It kills its own people and it takes over other countries and kills those people, too.

During the 20th century, communist governments killed an estimated 100 million of their own people and conquered nearly half the world. And then along came Ronald Reagan. He had a very simple plan for dealing with communism, a plan that he summed up in four words: “We win. They lose.”

When Ronald Reagan became president, he promised that freedom would leave communism on the ash heap of history. He called the evil empire what it was. He never flinched. He never faltered. He went to Berlin in 1987 and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” His own aides thought this was just crazy. They tried to stop him from giving that speech. But Reagan knew what he believed, and he knew why he believed it, and most important of all, Reagan was right.

Some people think that just because they really believe something, that’s all that counts. But believing isn’t any good, if what you believe is wrong.

Reagan left office in January 1989, and the wall was still standing. Mr. Gorbachev wasn’t going to tear it down -- and he didn’t have to.

Ten months later, I sat in my living room, with my baby daughter Kennedy on my lap, and live on CNN, I watched the people of Germany tear down that wall.

Remember, I was still a Democrat back then. But I knew I was watching history happen in front of my very eyes. And so I took out my notebook, and I wrote a note to my daughter. I dated it Nov. 9, 1989, and I said, “Kennedy, you will never believe how many millions of prayers were answered tonight. You will never know what it was like to live with the fear of communism.”
I had lived with that fear all my life -- I was born in 1959, the year Castro took over Cuba -- and suddenly, right there on my TV, I watched that wall come down. And within another two years, the Soviet Union fell completely apart -- into the ash heap of history, just like Reagan said.

Well, that was a long time ago, and some of you young people don’t even remember it. And some of you people, young and old, may wonder what this has to do with the problems we’re dealing with today. Well, let me ask you this: What problem do we as Americans face today that is worse than the Soviet Union?

Is Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda worse than the Red Army? Terrorism? Illegal immigration? Health care? Social Security? Is any of this, or all of it put together, really more frightening than the Evil Empire, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads, all targeted on us, and ready to blow us all to smithereens?

Come on, name me one problem we have today that’s worse than what Ronald Reagan faced when he became president. Our economy was a mess, our military was a shambles, the Soviets were in Afghanistan and communists were taking over in Nicarauga. Unemployment, inflation, crime, drugs -- everything was a complete mess, and all the experts were telling us that the American Dream was over. And yet, somehow, through all the doom and gloom and pessimism, Reagan believed. Reagan never doubted for a minute. Reagan had faith in America, faith in the people, faith in freedom, and faith in God.

Now think about all that, and look at where we are today. Sure, we’ve got problems. The Republican Party is a mess. The Democrats won the last election, and all the experts expect them to win the next one, too. Quite frankly, I’m tempted to agree.

But I’m not an expert. It’s nearly a year until the election, and anything could happen between now and then. But there’s one thing I know for sure: No matter who wins or loses next November, in the long run, freedom will win.

No matter what anybody tries to tell you, the American people are still the greatest people on earth. America is still a great nation, and it always will be, as long as the people have faith in God and faith in freedom.

That’s what Ronald Reagan believed, and there’s no reason we can’t believe it, too. Whatever problems we face today, we need to stay true to that belief. We need to carry on that legacy. It’s not complicated. In fact, it’s really quite simple. As simple as four little words: “We win, they lose.”

Robert Stacy McCain is co-author, with Lynn Vincent, of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party.